Shock: Dept. of Defense Vindicates Fort Hood Killer

By granting PFC Abdo’s conscientious objector claim, the Army may have created trouble for themselves in the court martial of Major Hasan for the murder of his thirteen fellow soldiers at Fort Hood. Hasan’s attorney can now claim that by refusing to acknowledge Major Hasan’s claims under Islamic law as a conscientious objector and granting him an honorable discharge, the Army created irreconcilable conflict that prompted the Fort Hood massacre. And they can use the secretary of the Army’s decision in the Abdo case as proof.

But they have also created a greater problem. By bowing to the dictates of Islamic law, which defines the killing of a Muslim by another Muslim without right as terrorism, the U.S. Army has tacitly endorsed a religiously bigoted position that it is perfectly fine for Muslim service members to kill non-Muslims, but killing their co-religionists is totally out-of-bounds and is grounds for an honorable discharge. Is any other religion granted such accommodation? Will this decision help or discredit those Muslims serving honorably with both their fellow soldiers and the Muslim community?

Despite years of protestation by the U.S. government to the contrary, this decision vindicates all of these who have claimed that America is engaged in a war against Islam (including Osama bin Laden). The position that the Army now takes would also appear to acknowledge the classic Islamic doctrine of jihad that states that any incursion by non-Muslims into the lands of Dar al-Islam makes it an incumbent duty upon all Muslims everywhere to resist the “occupiers” -- the position taken by al-Qaeda and every Islamic terrorist group on the planet.

How did the United States Army arrive at such a convoluted, ill-informed, contradictory, and self-defeating policy? By listening to the very Islamic “outreach” partners they have falsely assumed are operating in America’s best interests.